"Poverty in America" -- Big Numbers / Little Hardship

[Ioannis]

'POVERTY' IN AMERICA: BIG NUMBERS, MODEST HARDSHIP
'POVERTY' IN AMERICA | By ROBERT RECTOR | Opinions | Scott Stringer | Adam Brodsky

August 30, 2007 -- THE Census Bureau announced Tuesday that 36.5 million Americans are "poor." Presidential candidate John Edwards claims these 36.5 million Americans "do not have enough money for the food, shelter and clothing they need." According to Edwards, poverty is an appalling national "plague" forcing "one in eight of us" to live in "terrible" circumstances.

But, if poverty means (as Edwards claims) a lack of nutritious food, adequate warm housing and clothing, then very few of the 36.5 million people identified as "poor" by Census are, in fact, poor.

Some material hardship does exist in America, but it is quite limited in severity and scope.

According to the government's own data, the typical person defined as "poor" by the Census has cable or satellite TV, air conditioning, a microwave, a DVD player or VCR, and two color TVs. Three quarters of these "poor" own a car and nearly a third have two or more cars.

By his own testimony, the typical "poor" person consistently has enough food to feed his family and enough money to meet all essential expenses such as mortgage, rent, utilities and important medical care. When asked, he reports that his family was able to obtain medical care whenever needed during the past year.

Government data show that 43 percent of all "poor" Americans actually own their own homes - typically, a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio.

Only 6 percent of "poor" families are overcrowded. In fact, poor Americans living in houses or apartments, on average, have more living space per person that does the average citizen living in European countries such as England, France and Germany. (Note: this comparison is to the average European, not poor Europeans.)

As a group, America's poor are far from chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Most poor children today are, in fact, super-nourished - growing up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

Some poor families do experience temporary food shortages, a condition touted as "hunger" by activists. But even this condition is relatively rare: 89 percent of the poor report their families always have "enough" food to eat, while only 2 percent say they "often" do not have enough to eat.

Much of the official poverty that does exist is self-inflicted, a result of poor decisions and self-defeating behaviors. Weak work ethic plays a big role in poverty: In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year - 16 hours per week.

If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year - the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours a week throughout the year - nearly 75 percent of poor children would be immediately lifted out of official poverty.

Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes. Another 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock each year. If poor single mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

While work and marriage are reliable ladders out of poverty, the welfare system remains perversely hostile to both. Despite welfare reform, major programs such as food stamps, public housing and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to require work and encourage marriage, poverty among children would drop substantially.

Immigration also plays a major role in U.S. poverty. Each year, our nation imports hundreds of thousands of new poor persons. Porous borders encourage some 800,000 illegal aliens a year to enter the nation. And our legal immigration system strongly favors low-skill immigrants over higher-skill immigrants.

As a result, one quarter of all poor persons in the United States are now immigrants or their minor children. An amazing one in 10 of the poor counted by Census is either an illegal alien or the minor child of an illegal.

Immigrants tend to be poor because they are poorly educated; some 60 percent of illegal aliens and a quarter of legal immigrants lack a high-school degree, compared to 12 percent of native-born Americans. As long as the massive flow of poverty-prone persons from foreign countries continues, efforts to reduce poverty in the United States will be far more difficult. Any sound anti-poverty strategy must stop illegal immigration, and increase the skill level of future legal immigrants.

Robert Rector is senior research fellow in domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Ioannis

Robert Rector is senior research fellow in domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundations has to be the most manipulative through deception American machinery.

A few facts:

From The Heritage Foundation website: The Heritage Foundation: A Conservative think tank that is at the forefront of the pro-globalization perspective.

Quoting for the most part:

The Heritage Foundation has a record of producing manipulative reports, such as one for which the deputy chief actuary of the Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out "major errors in the methodology". From what I'm reading, that is actuary-speak for "damn lies". I'm quoting most of it.

Paul Weyrich, the first director of The Heritage Foundation, and often described by his admirers as "the Lenin of social conservatism," seldom was at a loss for a military analogy: "If your enemy has weapons systems working and is killing you with them, you'd better have weapons systems of your own."

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[Menydh]

Poverty in America Today

The United States is a nation pulling apart to a degree unknown in the last twenty-five years. A decade of strong national economic growth in the 1990s left many of America's communities falling far behind median national measures of economic health. Despite the investments in transportation and public facilities infrastructures, massive movements of capital and people, and the expectations of most regional economists over the past forty years, the nation's regional development patterns are becoming more uneven. Income inequality is on the rise. The number of communities falling behind the national economic average is increasing. This tendency has been most pronounced in recent years, when trade liberalization and globalization have greatly opened the American economy.

According to our estimates in 2003, almost 25% of the nation's counties had low per-capita incomes below one half the national average or less, high unemployment, low labor force participation rates, and a high dependency on government transfer payments-all measures of economic distress. These communities are located in timber, agricultural, and mineral and energy resource areas in the nation and in regions of the Deep South including the Mississippi Delta, the eastern coal belt of Appalachia, historic New Mexican and Native American communities, and along our borders. More recently, newly distressed counties are experiencing the collapse of their post-war low-wage manufacturing economies. At a smaller spatial scale, communities in persistent poverty also are present in the nation's cities, where long-term decline has left core urban areas of cities such as Washington, DC, Detroit, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California with limited job opportunities, high levels of poverty, and populations with few effective means of economic advancement.

The problem of persistent poverty is a complex one that includes communities and individuals who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unable to make ends meet in this globalizing, information-intensive world. People at risk are women, children, and people of color, single-parent families, and the elderly. Large numbers of the nation's citizens live at or below the poverty threshold, which means each month is a struggle to pay the bills and provide the basics, including food, clothing, and shelter, not to mention access to health care and simple comforts. How can the richest country in the world still have more than 12% of its total population, and al-most 20% of all children under the age of 18, unable to meet, let alone be guaranteed coverage of, basic needs? Today, as a nation, we are significantly different than we were in 1960, when more than 20% of the population was visibly poor and lacked basic goods, including food, clothing, proper shelter, clean water, heating, health care, and access to decent schools. We are a more diverse population and a more dispersed population; we are older and remain divided by race, income, and location.

Certainly progress has been made over the intervening forty years in terms of an overall minimum standard of living as measured by material conditions. And yet the lived experience of poor people is starkly different from that of individuals and families who enjoy some degree of economic security as measured by income levels that pro-vide comfortable, worry-free circumstances. If anything, the gap between the economically secure and the poor is more severe than it was four decades ago. Increasingly, the nation is composed of persons who look to a future in which circumstances include the expectation of more wealth, security, and opportunity; and the alternative, those who struggle to make ends meet. In many families today, children cannot say they expect to be better off than their parents. This is perhaps the greatest challenge now facing our society. Forty years ago, public officials took a stand against economic deprivation. For a short period of time we made huge strides in reducing economic insecurity. America is again facing this serious challenge. Once again we can make a difference if we choose to look this issue in the eye and invest in people and communities.

Poverty in America: One Nation, Pulling Apart -- Home

[Marcus Marulus]

The article is ridiculous. Data obtained from organizations like "Heritage", "Acton" and similar are as much reliable for the understanding of the reality in the modern America as was the newspaper "Pravda" (the main official journal of the USSR) for understanding the life realities in the former USSR.

When speaking of poverty, one has to take into account not only what one nominally possesses, but also how much indebted he is.